What Planet is Barry On?

Thursday

May 29, 2014 at 12:35 PMMay 29, 2014 at 12:46 PM

Back in 2008, I asked who was advising Barry on foreign policy, and no one had an answer. Even today, its not clear who is advising Barry on foreign policy. By this point in almost every presidential administration, you could point at a book, or a series of books, and say, aha, that’s what the president believes and that’s what he does. Whether it was Nixon with Kissinger or Carter with his team, there was always a doctrine. As far as I can tell, the Barry Doctrine is defined as “threaten, cut and run, kill innocent people with drones in non-combatant countries and bow to the Saudis.” If he’d just admit that, it would be ok, since we would at least know.

But Barry won’t admit that. He comes out and makes widely inconsistent statements. The guy who murders with drones bristles at people who say he isn’t combative enough. And the guy who seems to think that leaving 10,000 troops in Afghanistan with a removal date of 2017 doesn’t understand why everyone else in the world thinks he has lost his marbles. And then there was that rather weird statement on Afghanistan in which he said that wars are easy to start, but hard to end. Really? Barry is single handedly rejecting the careful research and work of the likes of Fred Charles Ikle, Ann Hironaka and James D.D. Smith? In fact, academics now opine that it is very hard to start wars (W and Barry had to lie to the American people to start their aggressive wars) but that it is increasingly easy to end wars. So what does Barry rely upon in his assertion?

Rick opined in an earlier post that Putin “blinked.” I liked the position from AJ that the world is, at the moment, “on hold,” that the world has recognized that Barry is such a waste product and American policy is so adrift that everyone–the Syrians, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Sudanese, Iranians, Israelis, Egyptians, the PLO and dozens more–have simply hit the pause button waiting for Barry to be gone. Military and economic policy. As in, Barry’s inability to lead and state policy is actually causing the death of civilians and harming the global economy.

Now that we’ve heard Barry’s attempt to explain what he believes, and his explanation just makes things worse, it seems that his best foreign policy is obvious: he should resign before he does more harm.

Back in 2008, I asked who was advising Barry on foreign policy, and no one had an answer. Even today, its not clear who is advising Barry on foreign policy. By this point in almost every presidential administration, you could point at a book, or a series of books, and say, aha, that’s what the president believes and that’s what he does. Whether it was Nixon with Kissinger or Carter with his team, there was always a doctrine. As far as I can tell, the Barry Doctrine is defined as “threaten, cut and run, kill innocent people with drones in non-combatant countries and bow to the Saudis.” If he’d just admit that, it would be ok, since we would at least know.

But Barry won’t admit that. He comes out and makes widely inconsistent statements. The guy who murders with drones bristles at people who say he isn’t combative enough. And the guy who seems to think that leaving 10,000 troops in Afghanistan with a removal date of 2017 doesn’t understand why everyone else in the world thinks he has lost his marbles. And then there was that rather weird statement on Afghanistan in which he said that wars are easy to start, but hard to end. Really? Barry is single handedly rejecting the careful research and work of the likes of Fred Charles Ikle, Ann Hironaka and James D.D. Smith? In fact, academics now opine that it is very hard to start wars (W and Barry had to lie to the American people to start their aggressive wars) but that it is increasingly easy to end wars. So what does Barry rely upon in his assertion?

Rick opined in an earlier post that Putin “blinked.” I liked the position from AJ that the world is, at the moment, “on hold,” that the world has recognized that Barry is such a waste product and American policy is so adrift that everyone–the Syrians, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Sudanese, Iranians, Israelis, Egyptians, the PLO and dozens more–have simply hit the pause button waiting for Barry to be gone. Military and economic policy. As in, Barry’s inability to lead and state policy is actually causing the death of civilians and harming the global economy.

Now that we’ve heard Barry’s attempt to explain what he believes, and his explanation just makes things worse, it seems that his best foreign policy is obvious: he should resign before he does more harm.